Abstract

The concept of ?constructions? covers the range from fully unanalyzed or ?frozen? units to abstract and productive schemas that can be used to form new utterances, even with verbs that usually have a different valency (coercion). The dynamic nature of the construction as well as its functional grounding makes the construction particularly suitable for describing and explaining the course of language acquisition. Distributional analyses of the linguistic structures used across development as well as experimental tests on the productivity of these structures are the methodological means to assess the degree of freedom of constructions used at each point in development. In the earliest stages of development children rely heavily on bottom up processes and generalize only slowly. But with growing productivity they are able to generate new utterances top down.